Abstract
This paper examines the right to ecological and organic agriculture-based food security through rural small-holder family farming or associated livestock production, fishing, pastoralism and gathering, as an important ethical concern. It discusses how rural small-holder rights to adequate, healthy, safe, nutritious food (as well as land, seeds, waters, and traditional or local knowledge needed for producing an ecologically sustaining food sources) remain poorly understood or ignored, inadequately supported or advocated and not legally defended well by governments. It further suggests that those rights, and small farmers’ ability to earn a decent, socially responsible and ecologically sustainable livelihood, may be undermined by governments and large, multinational private sector companies, through unjust (de facto unethical) policies or laws, and even corporate criminal behaviour. The paper reviews such as issues in the context of agrarian reform and justice demands, global policy debates, guiding ethical norms and legal frameworks, recommendations from international agency reports, identified human rights obligations of transnational corporations and arguments from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. In sum, it argues that governments have a moral (and in some respects legal) obligation to better uphold the rights of small-holder family farmers to practice ecological or organic agriculture, allowing them to produce appropriate and adequate food. It suggests that national planning, policy reforms and development cooperation might better acknowledge and support this obligation while beginning new initiatives during the United Nations International Year of Family Farming, 2014.
Presented to The First International Conference of the Asia-Pacific Society for Food and Agricultural Ethics (APSAFE 2013) “Food Safety and Security for the 21st Century”, November 28–30, 2013, Chulalongkorn University
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Notes
- 1.
The concept of small-hold farmers can include family or local/peasant or indigenous community farmers involved in many types of primarily local food growing or associated livestock production, fishing, pastoralism and gathering, for their own food security, and to support adequate income generation, “fair trade” and rural livelihoods principally benefiting families, small groups or local communities. Small-hold farms could include personal or family businesses on small plots of land, or those managed by small cooperative groups, or even local small business enterprises. The concept of a “small” geographical area, scale of operations or farm size (hectares, employees, income, sales, etc.) is relative. But it usually refers to the vast majority (at least 90 %) of up to 1.5 billion farmers worldwide, mostly in developing countries of the Global South, managing or working on some 404 million farms of less than 2 ha producing around 70 % of the world’s food (IFOAM 2011; World Rural Forum 2011). Small does not include large domestic or international food or farming corporations which own or run industrial-scale agribusiness operations on hundreds, thousands or even millions of hectares.
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Nelles, W. (2015). The Right to Organic/Ecological Agriculture and Small-Holder Family Farming for Food Security as an Ethical Concern. In: Hongladarom, S. (eds) Food Security and Food Safety for the Twenty-first Century. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-417-7_13
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